The present invention relates generally to tea making and dispensing, and more particularly to an infuser for making tea, "herbal teas," coffees, flavored coffees and teas, and other steeped beverages. The infuser provides improved performance, convenience and other advantages in use, and is preferably a low-cost, disposable unit.
In recent years, there has been a rapid upsurge of interest in so-called gourmet coffee beverages. The numerous flavors and varieties of coffees have been heavily advertised and promoted. The public has become acquainted with specialty coffee shops serving a large variety of these products. Many so-called premium coffee shops receive high prices for their products, whether sold for on-premises or off-premises consumption.
Owing in part to the increasing saturation of the "gourmet" coffee market, and in response to a perceived need for lower-caffeine "healthy" beverages, there has been a growing interest in the consumption of teas and "herbal teas" (also known as "tisanes" and "infusions") in the United States. Worldwide, teas have a much longer tradition of acceptance than coffee and are consumed on a very widespread basis.
While tea brewing and consumption differ from coffee brewing and consumption in several important respects, the products and methods in other respects present similar problems, many of which are overcome by the present invention.
Prior to the advent of the tea bag, tea was customarily prepared by placing tea leaves in a pot, over which leaves near-boiling water was poured and steeped until a beverage of the desired strength was reached. In order to avoid the buildup of bitterness or other undesirable flavor, it was known to provide screens or strainers whereby the tea leaves could be confined for removal at a desired point in the brewing cycle. The use of strainers and the like, however, has the drawback of being relatively clumsy and inefficient from an equipment standpoint. Strainers require frequent cleaning and require the user to remove the strainer when the desired strength of beverage has been achieved. Strainers are also difficult to fill, seal, and to remove and store without dripping. Strainers are also often too small to allow sufficient circulation of water, particularly when using the highest quality "full leaf" teas.
While the tea bag addresses certain of the disadvantages with straining equipment, it too, has many disadvantages. Most bagged tea is of low quality, and the process of placing tea leaves in bags involves the crushing and breaking of the leaves, to the considerable detriment of flavor. The relatively small size and fine texture of the tea bag restricts the circulation of the leaves in the hot water, inhibiting rapid and full diffusion of the flavors into the body of the liquid. In addition, used tea bags, like the aforementioned strainers, create removal and disposal problems, particularly when the beverage is sold "to go" or on a "carry out" basis.
Another disadvantage of the tea bag is that it typically is available in one or two sizes only, effectively predetermining beverage strength for "carry out" products. Tea beverage strength is often varied by adjusting the proportion of water added to the leaves. However, for on-premises brewing of tea that is to be sold "to go," cup sizes are generally standardized and, consequently, strength variation is not easily achieved where the size of the tea bag is fixed.
Bagging tea also adds significant cost to the price of the beverage. Commonly, tea is enclosed in a bag (often, with an attached string and tab to facilitate removal); the bag is in turn placed in a paper or foil envelope or sleeve, and then the envelope or sleeve is placed in a box. The cost of these steps and/or materials is substantial. Moreover, tea bags are far more bulky per serving than "loose" teas, thereby increasing the costs of shipping, storing, and serving tea to consumers.
Another significant economic drawback of "bagging" tea is the cost of buying, maintaining, and operating expensive and specialized bagging equipment. Tea "co-packers" typically require minimum "run" quantities for a particular bag filling of 100,000 bags or more. A vendor's ability to commit to a wide variety of flavors in these quantities is considered prohibitively costly for all but the most established companies. Another difficulty with "co-packing" tea bags arises from the large scale, mass production aspect of such bagging: there can be considerable delays in scheduling and completing production runs. Obviously, passing tea ingredients--many of which are imported--through middlemen such as co-packers and their distributors adds to the cost of the product, and the inherent delay may also compromise freshness and flavor.
Many tea drinkers are also acutely aware of environmental problems and, for such consumers, there is a negative reaction to bleached papers that are often used in tea bags. Moreover, the use of strings and staples to facilitate the removal of the bag at the desired point in the brewing cycle creates problems in the disposition of such products, including separating them from waste streams. "Stringless" tea bags are designed to address this problem, but they are clumsy for servers, who should, for sanitary reasons, use tongs to place the bag in a cup. Stringless bags also subject the user to certain risks and inconveniences in removing the bag at the desired point in the brewing cycle: often, stringless bags are plucked out of the hot tea with the user's bare fingers.
The foregoing disadvantages associated with tea bags are exacerbated when the beverage is sold "to go." The bag must be removed from the beverage between three and five minutes after purchase, typically too long to wait at the retail establishment and too soon before an appropriate receptacle for the dripping bag is located. Moreover, using a tea bag in a cup having a removable lid requires the user to open the lid in order to remove the bag, unless some sort of cumbersome bag receptacle is incorporated into the lid. The high temperature of the water creates a risk of injury if the cup is spilled while trying to remove the lid.
The foregoing aspects of the prior art practices argue strongly for using brewing methods other than those involving tea bags. However, the use of auxiliary equipment, including strainers, also creates difficulties in addition to the requirement that the equipment be manipulated after brewing and is hence unsuitable for takeout operations.
Referring now to the characteristics and advantages of bulk, "loose" tea as far as potential customer satisfaction and retailing profit are concerned, bulk tea is almost invariably perceived to be of higher quality than bagged tea. Bulk tea also requires less space per serving than bagged teas, for which allowance must be given for the waste space within the bag, and for the envelopes, sleeves, or boxes. Bulk tea is much more easily shipped and stored, and holds out the potential for saving a great amount of beverage preparation counter space. In order to serve a popular market successfully, it is believed that a vendor should be able to offer at least three to four varieties of black tea, several varieties of green tea, a significant number of herbal teas and a number of flavoring enhancers or additives. These aggregate at least 10 to 20 varieties of teas and flavoring products, all of which are available at lower cost in bulk, "loose" form and which can be shipped and stored in much smaller containers. Moreover, bulk tea containers, such as jars, can be easily resealed to retain freshness.
Bulk, "loose" forms of herbal teas are also ideal because their leaves are more fragile than those of traditional teas, and hence less susceptible to bagging. Herbal teas are presently believed to be the fastest growing product in terms of tea market share.
A particular problem associated with bags of blended or mixed teas is shelf life. Because particular teas or herbs may go stale faster than the remainder of the bag contents, the shelf life of the entire product is tied to the shelf life of the least stable ingredient. If flavoring agents or flavoring augmenters were available that could be used with existing teas having longer shelf life, then the shelf lives of the composite products could be effectively extended without excessively burdening the inventory or stock keeping process. Ensuring freshness of the entire beverage product and thereby maximizing flavor is always desirable, especially in a "gourmet" market.
In contrast to bagged teas, bulk or "loose" teas can be separately identified and kept in bins or jars from which the unique beverages can be custom blended "to taste" by each retailer to the order of a particular customer.
The growth of "herbal" teas which are of variable strength in relation to other teas, the growth of flavored teas, and the use of flavoring agents in tea such as spices and dried fruits, all argue strongly for having teas and their flavoring agents available in bulk quantities for custom blending "to taste" at the brewing site, especially for take-out customers. From the above, it is clear that a tea infuser of a proper design, i.e., a container for tea leaves in a cup or other brewing container, would serve many needs of tea retailers and consumers.
Besides tea, there are other hot beverages that can benefit from an infuser of proper design. For example, flavored coffees are quite popular, but must be made and served in quantity rather than to a customer's individual taste. Another example is the Asian hot milk based beverage known as "chai," whereby hot milk is flavored with cinnamon, pepper, ginger, crushed or shredded spices, herbs, and/or other flavoring agents. The use of a device that would enable such flavors to be added to hot milk on a custom basis would have a widespread appeal to chai fanciers, a rapidly-growing segment of the "gourmet" beverage market.
A properly-designed infuser would also facilitate the making of iced tea. An ideal situation would be to enable extremely hot water to be passed over a source of loose, fresh tea leaves custom-blended "to taste" in the infuser, sterilizing the leaves and extracting flavor almost instantaneously before being mixed with ice in the cup to achieve cooling. According to the invention, an infuser capable of simplifying the preparation and serving of iced tea is provided, and this infuser achieves other advantages as well.
Referring now to other advantages that might be gained by infusers of proper design, it would be advantageous if a permeable infuser could be made that would serve as a baffle below the surface of the liquid in the cup, thus preventing undesired "sloshing" of the beverage. Another advantage of an ideal infuser would be the ability to position tea leaves in such a way that, after the liquid level in the cup were lowered slightly, the strength of the beverage would not continue to increase, all without the risks of removing or repositioning the lid.
Still further, with products including coffee but primarily tea, wherein vapor phase flavor is inhaled by the user, a combination cover and infuser with an opening or recess to accommodate the nose of the user could favorably augment the apparent flavor of the product. In an ideal infuser, the wet, swollen, spent leaves might also serve as something analogous to a plug to augment the flavor of the liquid by sealing the container against loss of heat and volatile constituents.
Regarding the matter of serving tea for on-premises consumption or take out use, the so-called "gourmet" convenience coffee shops are confronted with difficulties not applicable to coffee. Thus, while a large pot of coffee can be brewed and many customers can be served from a common pot of large size, a principal advantage of tea is that the user may choose from a large number of flavors. This and the nature of the brewing process generally militate against keeping a large quantity of already- brewed tea on hand.
An ideal circumstance would be one wherein "loose" teas, "herbal" teas, and/or flavoring agents could be sanitarily placed in an exactly desired amount or proportion, as by a scoop or the like, into an infuser which could be associated with a cup into which extremely hot water could be added by passing over the leaves. This would enable the consumer to allow flavor to develop for the requisite time period and thereafter either remove the tea leaves and discard them without dripping, or lower the water/beverage level to isolate the tea from the water and thus terminate flavor build-up or change. Under further idealized conditions, the user could begin to sip the tea from the container for sampling purposes and thereby automatically remove the tea leaves from the liquid by lowering its level in the cup rather than by removing a bag or any auxiliary equipment.